this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Why do chimps kill chimps from other groups that come into their territory? Why do some chimps use aggression against other chimps to manipulate them, while other chimps use grooming?
A certain degree of sharing is part of our human / animal nature, but so is a certain degree of claiming ownership over things, and certain individuals have more sway over decisions than others. Flat hierarchies with nobody in command seem to work in theory, but in practice it's different.
That's the Naturalistic fallacy at work, though. We aren't chimps, nor is doing what humans did in the past necessarily better than what we do now. By that chain, you would be an Anarcho-primitivist.
We're apes, even if we're not chimps.
You're a mammal, a rat is a mammal - should we just consider you the same as a rat?
We can learn a lot about humans by studying rats. It doesn't mean that humans are the same as rats, but clearly we're not completely different either.
Yes?
But we aren't chimps, and you shouldn't judge the effectiveness of economic structures on what chimps do.
Nor should you pretend that we're not apes, and that ape behaviour has no relevance to humans.
It has about as much relevance as the behavior of any other mammal, circling back to my comment about rats.
We could study what various apes do, and try to use that to guess at possible human behaviour - or we could literally just look at human behaviour directly. Surely the direct observations of what humans do is going to give us a more accurate and useful model of human behaviour compared to observations of other species.
And when we do, we'll discover that in many ways it's similar to how other apes behave.
Surely knowing that the behaviour is so ingrained that it's also how apes behave makes it clear that it's not some easy thing to change.
Let me know when you start eating bananas naked in the woods and let me bring my camera.